Posts from the ‘Literature’ Category

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I SPEND A GOOD PART my time recording and archiving the soundscapes of Paris. As fascinating as the contemporary soundscapes of this city are though, I am always thinking about what the city might have sounded like in the past when sounds were impossible to capture and to replay.

It was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that it became possible to record sound and well into the twentieth century before attention turned towards recording urban soundscapes. Before that, our only source for what our towns and cities might have sounded like is to be found in literature – the written accounts of the sounds people heard.

The American writer, John Sanderson, for example arrived in Paris for the first time in July 1835 …

“All things of this earth seek, at one time or another, repose – all but the noise of Paris. The waves of the sea are sometimes still, but the chaos of these streets is perpetual from generation to generation; it is the noise that never dies.”

John Sanderson, Sketches of Paris: In Familiar Letters to His Friends (1838)

Clearly, John Sanderson wasn’t impressed with what he found. But contrast that with a description of a much earlier Paris.

In Chapter 2 of Book Three of his novel, Notre-Dame de Paris, also known as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Victor Hugo offers us a Bird’s Eye View of Paris in which he describes in fascinating detail the visual landscape of fifteenth century Paris from the top of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris.

A Modern Day View from the Top of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris.

Image via Wikipedia

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame was published in 1831 and it is clear in the novel that Victor Hugo was lamenting how the city had changed. About the Cathedral for example he says:

“The church of Notre-Dame de Paris is still no doubt, a majestic and sublime edifice. But, beautiful as it has been preserved in growing old, it is difficult not to sigh, not to wax indignant, before the numberless degradations and mutilations which time and men have both caused the venerable monument to suffer, without respect for Charlemagne, who laid its first stone, or for Philip Augustus, who laid the last.”

But it is when it comes to the sounds of fifteenth century Paris that Hugo is at his most eloquent.

“And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with which the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb – on the morning of some grand festival, beneath the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost – climb upon some elevated point, whence you command the entire capital; and be present at the wakening of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it is the sun which gives it, all those churches quiver simultaneously. First come scattered strokes, running from one church to another, as when musicians give warning that they are about to begin. Then, all at once, behold! – for it seems at times, as though the ear also possessed a sight of its own,—behold, rising from each bell tower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. First, the vibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and, so to speak, isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky; then, little by little, as they swell they melt together, mingle, are lost in each other, and amalgamate in a magnificent concert. It is no longer anything but a mass of sonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth from the numerous belfries; floats, undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, and prolongs far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of its oscillations.

Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and profound as it is, it has not lost its transparency; you behold the windings of each group of notes which escapes from the belfries. You can follow the dialogue, by turns grave and shrill, of the treble and the bass; you can see the octaves leap from one tower to another; you watch them spring forth, winged, light, and whistling, from the silver bell, to fall, broken and limping from the bell of wood; you admire in their midst the rich gamut which incessantly ascends and re-ascends the seven bells of Saint-Eustache; you see light and rapid notes running across it, executing three or four luminous zigzags, and vanishing like flashes of lightning. Yonder is the Abbey of Saint-Martin, a shrill, cracked singer; here the gruff and gloomy voice of the Bastille; at the other end, the great tower of the Louvre, with its bass. The royal chime of the palace scatters on all sides, and without relaxation, resplendent trills, upon which fall, at regular intervals, the heavy strokes from the belfry of Notre-Dame, which makes them sparkle like the anvil under the hammer. At intervals you behold the passage of sounds of all forms which come from the triple peal of Saint-Germaine des Prés. Then, again, from time to time, this mass of sublime noises opens and gives passage to the beats of the Ave Maria, which bursts forth and sparkles like an aigrette of stars. Below, in the very depths of the concert, you confusedly distinguish the interior chanting of the churches, which exhales through the vibrating pores of their vaulted roofs.

Assuredly, this is an opera, which it is worth the trouble of listening to. Ordinarily, the noise which escapes from Paris by day is the city speaking; by night, it is the city breathing; in this case, it is the city singing. Lend an ear, then, to this concert of bell towers; spread over all the murmur of half a million men, the eternal plaint of the river, the infinite breathings of the wind, the grave and distant quartette of the four forests arranged upon the hills, on the horizon, like immense stacks of organ pipes; extinguish, as in a half shade, all that is too hoarse and too shrill about the central chime, and say whether you know anything in the world more rich and joyful, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes;—than this furnace of music,—than these ten thousand brazen voices chanting simultaneously in the flutes of stone, three hundred feet high,—than this city which is no longer anything but an orchestra,—than this symphony which produces the noise of a tempest.”

In articles for this blog I always include a sound, or sounds, of Paris that I’ve recorded, to which I add words and pictures to give the sounds an historical, social or cultural context. On this occasion, any sounds I could add would be quite superfluous to the words of Victor Hugo and the magnificent soundscape he describes.

I suggest you just relax, read Hugo’s words and, as he says, “Lend an ear, then, to this concert … this symphony which produces the noise of a tempest”.

‘THE LOST GENERATION’ was a phrase coined in the early 1920s by Gertrude Stein, the Paris based American novelist, poet and playwright, to describe the generation who came of age in World War I. ‘Lost’ in this sense didn’t mean disappeared but rather the disorientation, confusion and aimlessness among the war’s survivors in the early post-war years.

Among that lost generation was the young Ernest Hemingway who had enlisted as an ambulance driver in 1918 and was posted to the Italian Front where he was wounded shortly after he arrived. He returned to the United States in 1919 but it wasn’t long before a favourable exchange rate and the post-war spirit of daring and freedom lured him and his wife to Paris.

In the early post-war years Paris was awash with expatriate artists, writers, poverty-stricken intellectuals and political exiles with many of them congregating in Montparnasse, the heart of intellectual and artistic life in Paris during the 1920s and 30s. They became known as the Montparnos.

“What seduced them [the Montparnos] was the café life and the café-sitting, a free and open style of living that they didn’t know either in London or anywhere in Puritanical America; it was an international bazaar, a county fair, a round-robin dance of the Rotonde, the Dôme, the Parnasse where all hours of the day a person could indiscriminately work, drink, play the piano (on Sunday, no less) – even with women one didn’t know, who freely offered to make one’s acquaintance simply for the fun of seeing an American artist close up, or, if they weren’t quite so spontaneously free, then some milk for their hunger, a couple of shots of liquor for their boredom …”

Ernest and Hadley Hemingway arrived in Paris in December 1921 and, after a couple of false starts, they moved to an apartment in rue Notre-Dame des Champs in early 1924. Hemingway worked as a journalist but after their move to rue Notre-Dame des Champs there were some particularly hungry months when he gave up journalism and tried his hand at writing short stories.

While most of the literary crowd were to be found at Le Dôme, La Rotonde, Le Select, or La Coupole, when he wanted to work undisturbed Hemingway preferred a café further along boulevard du Montparnasse closer to his lodgings – La Closerie des Lilas.

Originally a stop on the main coach route out of Paris, La Closerie des Lilas was opened in 1847 on the corner of boulevard du Montparnasse and boulevard St. Michel, next to rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and l’avenue de l’Observatoire. In the late 19th-century, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Émile Zola, Paul Cezanne and Théophile Gautier were frequent visitors and, at the turn of the 20th century, it became a favoured literary salon for the likes of Guillaume Apollinaire.

In A Moveable Feast, a memoir about his years as a struggling, young, expatriate journalist and writer in Paris in the 1920s, Hemingway says:

“The Closerie des Lilas was the nearest good café when we lived in the flat over the sawmill at 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and it was one of the first best cafés in Paris. It was warm inside in the winter and in the spring and fall it was very fine outside with the tables under the shade of the trees on the side where the statue of Marshal Ney was, and the square, regular tables under the big awnings along the boulevard.”

A Moveable Feast, p. 81

It was at one of the tables under the shade of the trees that F. Scott Fitzgerald read the manuscript of The Great Gatsby to Hemingway.

I called into La Closerie des Lilas at around three o’clock in the afternoon as the last of the lunch guests were leaving and before the evening diners arrived. I opted for a seat in the corner under the glass roof of the brasserie. When Hemingway was here, he would sit at a table to the right of the bar in the mornings while in the late afternoon he chose a corner table with the low light from the west coming in over his shoulder. He would most likely have ordered his customary café crème as he worked on the first draft of his novel, The Sun Also Rises, a draft he completed here.

Sitting in my corner seat amidst the gentle hum of La Closerie des Lilas I couldn’t help thinking about Gertrude Stein’s Lost Generation. Hemingway thought about it too; he used the phrase as one of two contrasting epigraphs for The Sun Also Rises:

“You are all a lost generation”

– Gertrude Stein in Conversation

“What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.”

In the book, Paul paints an absorbing picture of daily life in the rue de la Huchette bringing together a cast of characters, from the stately Monsieur de Malancourt to l’Hibou, the tramp, from the culturally precocious Hyacinth to a flock of prostitutes. He weaves their friendships and enmities, culture and way of life into a rich and compelling tapestry.

The rue de la Huchette looking to the west

Today, the rue de la Huchette is a street with more gift shops than you could shake a stick at, more restaurants per square metre than anywhere else in Paris, most of them Greek, it’s a street constantly awash with tourists and it has perhaps the best jazz club in town.

Having read the book, I thought it would be interesting to follow in Elliot Paul’s footsteps and explore the rue de la Huchette.

“The rue de la Huchette, in time and space, had a beginning, a middle and an ending. Centuries ago, when Paris was a walled city on the Île de la Cité and cows were pastured in what is now the place St. Germain, some of the first Parisians to quit the fortified island area settled along the left bank of the Seine. The rue de la Huchette runs parallel to the river, just a few yards south of the quai. No one seems to be clear about the meaning of its name, least of all the modern inhabitants.”

The Last Time I Saw Paris – Elliot Paul

Rue du Chat Qui Pêche today

“The middle section of the street was cut, but not crossed, by two streets even smaller than the rue de la Huchette – the rue Zacharie and the rue du Chat Qui Pêche (street of the cat who fishes), so named because in the early days before the quai was built, a cat used to fish in the cellars when the Seine was high. The rue du Chat Qui Pêche had the distinction of being the narrowest and shortest in the world, with only one window not more than a foot square and no doors at all.”

The Last Time I Saw Paris – Elliot Paul

The Bureau de Police

“On one corner of the rue du Chat Qui Pêche stood the Bureau de Police, not important enough to rate a police car. It was lucky to have a telephone. The ‘flics’ or cops, used bicycles or patrolled soundlessly on foot, invariably in pairs.”

The Last Time I Saw Paris – Elliot Paul

The former Bureau de Police today

“Le Panier Fleurie, the neighbourhood bordel run by Madame Mariette, was opposite the station house on the corner of the rue Zacharie.”

The Last Time I Saw Paris – Elliot Paul

The former bordel, Le Panier Fleurie, today

“The south-east corner was occupied by a laundry which employed three hard-working girls and also served as a ‘clandestin’. That is to say, men who found it banal to patronise the orthodox establishment could, if they were known to Mme. Lanier, go upstairs with the laundress of their choice. This illegal arrangement increased the income of Mme. Lanier, her non-productive husband, and the girls, and, in the opinion of the easy-going sergeant, did no one any harm.”

The Last Time I Saw Paris – Elliot Paul

The former laundry and ‘clandestin’ today

“The eastern end of the rue de la Huchette revolved around the Hôtel du Caveau.

“In contrast with the Hôtel du Caveau, the residents and personnel of the Hôtel Normandie did not seem one weirdly assorted family. The Gentile patron did not beat his wife, a sad-faced Jewish woman from the Temple quarter, but he let her do practically all the work that the one-armed garcon, Louis, did not volunteer to do, when his own huge share had been accomplished.”

The Last Time I Saw Paris – Elliot Paul

The former Hôtel Normandie today

“At the eastern end, next door to the Hôtel du Caveau, was the tiny stationary shop of Achille and Geneviève Taitbout, a small squint-eyed couple who shuffled around wearily, maintaining a perpetual relationship in their movements, like figures on a stage. Their daily routine involved getting up at five in the morning to receive a bundle of newspapers brought by a lad on a bicycle. On the infrequent occasions when the delivery boy did not show up, or was late, they pottered and muttered collectively, like a mechanical toy running down.”

The Last Time I Saw Paris – Elliot Paul

The former papeterie today

“Green vegetables, meat, poultry, fish, etc., were purchased by Monsieur Henri in Les Halles, or central markets, with skill and discrimination. Some of his staple groceries he bought at the local Épicerie, or grocery, at N° 27, called ‘L’Épicerie Danton’ and owned by Jean-Baptiste Emile Denis Emanuel Corre and his wife, Gabrielle, who looked like a porcelain doll. Mme Corre had style without chic, and a kind of beauty without savour that remained constant throughout the years.”

The Last Time I Saw Paris – Elliot Paul

The former L’Épicerie Danton today

“The horse butcher in the rue de la Huchette, N° 13, also had a sideline of mending hunting horns, so that when one passed his awninged and curtained doorway with the golden horse’s head aloft, one frequently heard their flourishes or plaintive moans.

The Last Time I Saw Paris – Elliot Paul

The former horse butchers today

“… the florist at N° 23 had steady customers from large restaurants and hotels. The shop of Madame Durand was situated within easy walking distance of the fragrant Marché aux Fleurs behind the prefecture. Two mornings a week this market spilled over its boundaries on the quai and flooded the near-by bridges with potted plants and cut flowers, not to mention shrubs and, in season, Christmas trees. Therefore Albertine Durand could undersell other florists who could not have their wares transported so cheaply and easily. So Madame Durand did a business quite out of proportion to the size of our street. She got up at five every morning, dressed without waking her husband, the Gentile inspector of kosher meat, whose hours were from eight to six.

The Last Time I Saw Paris – Elliot Paul

Madame Durand’s florists shop today

“The spade-bearded Monsieur Saint-Aulaire, who presided over the two-man tailor shop at N° 21, could not afford an atelier on the boulevard. He had never prospered, and never gone broke. So he acted as if he were tailor by appointment to the Duc de Guise (pretender to the throne), and although his manners were impeccable, he did not consider it as much of an honour to make a chalk-mark on the shoulder of Senator Berenger as on that of the penniless Honoré de Senlis, who played billiards with a duke.”

Monsieur Saint-Aulaire’s tailor shop today

Like most long-time residents in Paris, I’ve become quite selective about which places in this city are my favourites and which are not. When I tell other long-time residents that one of my favourite places in Paris is the Rue de la Huchette I usually get, at best, a sideways glance or, more commonly, a look of total bewilderment.

But every time I walk along this street, Elliot Paul’s compelling inages of this place in the inter-war years always transcend today’s seemingly never-ending gift shops and eateries. Woolly hats and kebabs give way to images, not only of the the people I’ve already mentioned, but to Luttenschlager selling his articles of piety, Noël, the taxidermist, Dorlan the bookbinder, Gilottes at the bakery, Julien and Mme. Julien the barber and hairdreser, Joli, the cleaner and dyer, Gion and Bernice and their music shop not to mention Maurice, pedlar of goldfish. Of course, the threat of the Second World War endowed all these quiet, heroic lives with a tragic poignancy.

I’m just sorry that I haven’t (yet) been able to find any sounds of the rue de la Huchette during the inter-war years to match the word pictures that Elliot Paul paints but my search will continue.

Oh, yes … the jazz club! It’s in the basement of the former Hôtel du Caveau and I promise you, it’s well worth a visit. You’ll find jazz here to satisfy every taste. You might like to take a look at this to give you a flavour!

AU BONHEUR DES DAMES is a novel by Emile Zola set in the world of the department store in nineteenth-century Paris. It covers the period approximately from 1864 to 1869 and it’s the eleventh novel in Zola’s Rougon-Macqart series.

From Zola’s original manuscript for Au Bonheur des Dames

When Zola was writing Au Bonheur des Dames, department stores were not only a new concept, their approach to retail sales was nothing short of revolutionary, which I suppose is what sparked Zola’s interest. Today of course we take department stores and other mega retail outlets for granted.

Following on from a blog piece I published recently about l’Assommoir,a Zola novel set around the quartier de la Goutte d’Or, I thought it would be interesting to capture today’s soundscape of Zola’s setting for Au Bonheur des Dames.

The department store at the centre of Zola’s novel is called Au Bonheur des Dames (Ladies’ Delight or Ladies’ Paradise) and Zola modelled it on Aristide Boucicaut’s hugely successful, Au Bon Marché, which, by 1852, had become one of the largest stores in Paris and one of the first department stores in the world.

Aristide Boucicaut

Boucicaut had revolutionary ideas about retailing. Under the Ancien Régime the typical retail outlet was the boutique specialising in one variety of product with no fixed pricing – bargaining was the rule. Boucicaut changed all that.

The change that he brought to retailing included everything we take for granted today. He was the first to “pile it high and sell it cheap”, he introduced the selling of more than one variety of product under the same roof, fixed pricing, the price ticketing of individual items, free entry encouraging customers to browse at will, the clearance sale, and for his employees – commission on sales and participation in profits.

These revolutionary changes of course came at a price.

Au Bon Marché in 1910

In the novel we see Octave Mouret, the owner of Au Bonheur des Dames, aiming to overwhelm the senses of his female customers, forcing them to spend by bombarding them with an array of choices and by juxtaposing goods in enticing and intoxicating ways. Massive advertising, huge sales, home delivery, a system of refunds and novelties such as a reading room and a snack bar, further induce his female clientele to patronize his store in growing numbers. In the process, he drives smaller, speciality shops out of business.

At the start of the book, Au Bonheur des Dames occupies almost a whole city block but Mouret is not beyond using all his political wiles to expand even further and threaten the existence of all the neighbourhood shops.

Au Bon Marché – Gravure

Today, Au Bon Marché is owned by the luxury goods group, LVMH, and it occupies more than one city block with the department store sitting cheek by jowl with the food hall, La Grande Épicerie de Paris, across the street.

Personally, I find the department store with its luxury brand boutiques and obscenely expensive prices not to my taste. But the food hall, La Grande Épicerie de Paris, is an absolute delight. With over 5,000 products from around the world they cater for every imaginable taste. If you can’t find it anywhere else, you’ll most likely find it here.

This year marks the 160th anniversary of Le Bon Marché.

In Au Bonheur des Dames, Zola tells the story of Denise Baudu, a 20-year-old woman from Valognes who comes to Paris with her brothers and begins working at the store as a saleswoman. We follow her progress amidst the many conflicts that spring from the struggles for advancement and the malicious infighting and gossip among the staff. But the novel is also about the symbols of capitalism, the rise of the modern city, class relations and, above all, the changes in consumer culture at the end of the nineteenth-century.

It’s fascinating to think that Emile Zola, with his characteristic eye for detail, must have walked through the vast expanse of Au Bon Marché collecting material for his novel just as I did collecting the sounds for this post. I wonder what he would make of the sights and sounds of Au Bon Marché today?

ABOUT A MONTH AGO my friend Susanna (La Cosa Preziosa) told me that she had just finished reading the novel L’Assommoir by Emile Zola. She said that she’d really enjoyed the book and would love to hear a sonic exploration of its locations as they are today. That sounded like a fascinating challenge to me.

L’Assommoir (1877) is considered to be one of Zola’s masterpieces – a harsh and uncompromising study of alcoholism and poverty in the working-class districts of Paris. The novel is set in the area surrounding the Rue de la Goutte d’Or, bordered by the Boulevard Barbès and the Boulevard de la Chapelle, an area close to the Métro station Barbès-Rochechouart in the 18th arrondissement. Today, the area still has its working-class roots although the population now comprises to a large extent immigrants from North Africa and elsewhere.

Boulevard Barbès

The Boulevard Barbès was created in 1867 as a travaux haussmanniens, part of Baron Haussmann’s transformation of Paris under the Second Empire. The Boulevard Barbés is the main artery through le quartier de la Goutte d’Or, the Goutte d’Or district.

The Boulevard de la Chapelle marks the border between the 10th arrondissement and the 18th arrondissement of Paris. It corresponds in part to the Mur des Fermiers Généraux, the Farmers-General wall, which, until 1860, marked the border between the communes of Paris and La Chapelle.

Boulevard de la Chapelle

The area around the Métro Barbès-Rochechouart and the Boulevard de la Chapelle is extremely lively and resembles a huge street bazaar with a jumble of stalls and vendors selling mainly cheap clothing. On a Saturday morning a colourful food market appears under the elevated Métro line.

Boulevard de la Chapelle

In the novel, it is here in the Boulevard de la Chapelle, in the Hôtel Boncoeur, that we first encounter Gervaise Macquart as her tragic story unfolds.

And so to the Rue de la Goutte d’Or, the working-class hub around which the life of Zola’s characters rotate.

Rue de la Goutte d’Or

Since the early years of the 20th century, the Rue de la Goutte d’Or and its environs has been home to an immigrant population. The North Africans came first but the big wave of immigrants arrived in the 1950s, often to work in the automobile industry. Today, as well as the North Africans, other communities have become established including people from the West Indies and from Bulgaria.

The novel l’Assomoir is essentially the story of Gervaise Macquart running away to Paris with her shiftless lover Lantier to work as a washerwoman in a hot, busy laundry in one of the seedier areas of the city. Well that seedy area was around here in the rue Neuve-de-la Goutte d’Or with its red brick washhouse reeking of steam. The Rue Neuve-de-la Goutte d’Or is now called the Rue des Islettes .

Rue des Islettes

Rue de la Goutte d’Or

Rue de la Goutte d’Or

Villa Poisonniére

In the middle of this North African enclave, behind an iron gate, is the Villa Poissonnière, an incongruous alleyway, which almost seems to have been placed here by mistake. This is believed to have been the property of a wine grower when this was open countryside, ideally situated on a sunny slope rolling gently to the south. In the Middle Ages the wine of the Goutte d’Or had quite a reputation. In fact, the name of the street itself comes from the particular golden colour of the white wine produced here. It was customary at the time for the City of Paris to give the king wine from the Goutte d’Or on his birthday.

Rue de la Goutte d’Or

L’Assomoir is one of the most powerful novels in French literature due in part to the huge amount of research Zola carried out both into the language of the street but also into the actual conditions in working-class 19th-century Paris.

And as for Gervaise …

“She sank lower day by day. As soon as she got a little money from any source whatever she drank it away at once. Her landlord decided to turn her out of the room she occupied, and as Father Bru was discovered dead one day in his den under the stairs, M. Marescot allowed her to take possession of his quarters. It was there, therefore, on the old straw bed, that she lay waiting for death to come. Apparently even Mother Earth would have none of her. She tried several times to throw herself out of the window, but death took her by bits, as it were. In fact, no one knew exactly when she died or exactly what she died of. They spoke of cold and hunger.

But the truth was she died of utter weariness of life …”

Rue de la Goutte d’Or

L’Assomoir is a novel written 135 years ago in which Emile Zola uses words to paint a vivid picture of 19th century working-class life in Paris at its darkest. Although we have contemporary visual images to support and add to Zola’s picture we have no contemporary sounds to give us a sonic perspective. We may think we know what the 19th century sounds of the quartier de la Goutte d’Or were but the fact is, we simply do not have any record of them. It is a sad truth, but most of our sonic heritage has passed by unrecorded.

The good news is that if anyone researching the location of L’Assomoir 135 years from now happens to come across this blog in some dusty electronic archive then they will at least have a contemporary account of the sounds of the quartier de la Goutte d’Or on one day in August 2012.

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About

This blog is dedicated to my recordings of the street sounds of Paris … and occasionally, to some other things too. I specialise in street recordings mostly in binaural stereo. I take my inspiration from the great twentieth-century street photographers who walked the streets seeking that elusive 'decisive moment'. For most of our history we have used artefacts, architecture, pictures and words to create a vision of our past. It’s only in the last thirty seconds or so on our historical clock that we have been able to capture and record sound. Almost all our sonic heritage has passed by unrecorded. That is why I, and many others, are dedicated to recording and archiving the sounds around us so that future generations will have the sounds of our time to explore, to study and to enjoy.